


A Dinner at June's

by facetofcathy



Category: White Collar
Genre: Episode Tag, Fix-It, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-13
Updated: 2011-06-13
Packaged: 2017-10-20 09:41:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,805
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/211389
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/facetofcathy/pseuds/facetofcathy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Episode tag to 3.01 (therefore spoilers).  June invites Neal and Mozzie to dinner.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Dinner at June's

"I'm not wearing a tie."

"Moz, no one is making you wear a tie," Neal said, "although, it wouldn't hurt to try updating your style once in a while."

"Says Captain Vintage," Mozzie replied.

"Exactly, vintage, as in a distinguished style that's stood the test of time."

"With the help of some mothballs and June's excellent cleaning staff."

"You can mock all you like, but these clothes tell people who Neal Caffery is. Classy but not stuffy, smart but fun, quirky but reliable."

"Thin enough to fit through the air vents in most European museums," Mozzie said.

"Whereas the average Mozzie ensemble says homeless paranoid who keeps his clothes in a storage locker in Queens," Neal answered.

"I prefer to think of it as being a property eschewing skeptic."

A knock sounded, and June pushed the door open. Mozzie took advantage of Neal's focus moving to the door to top up his wine.

"Don't you both look marvellous," she said.

Mozzie preened a little and resisted the urge to say I told you so. There was absolutely nothing wrong with a properly tied cravat.

"But the guests will be here shortly, so don't dawdle up here in your lair," she said.

"Hardly a lair, that sounds so disreputable," Neal said.

"Your aerie then?"

"My humble abode, just one of the many things I have because of your generous nature."

"Indeed," June said, and Mozzie thought she sounded a little sharp. Neal must have been taking liberties again.

"Five minutes, boys, or no dessert for either of you." June smiled and shut the door quietly behind her.

Neal turned and plucked the wine glass out of Mozzie's hand, and drained it dry, which was no way to treat a fine vintage, really.

* * *

June had invited them to dinner, told them when they were to appear, actually, but all she'd said was that she wanted a night for the young people. Mozzie had no idea who else was invited, but Cindy was in town, so likely her friends. Mozzie knew she was flattering him, including him with the young people, but it still felt good.

Neal swept into the dining room first, drawn in by the sound of laughter and the clink of June's fine crystal. Mozzie slipped in more quietly and poured himself a glass of a red even better than what Neal had been hiding in the top cupboard behind the caviar and the case lot of the tea Sara liked.

Cindy was gorgeous in a white linen suit, and she had a couple of young things in tow that looked only a little awed by June's table set fit for royalty, but just as lovely. Neal was trying his charm on Cindy again, and she was batting away his lines faster than a pro at Flushing Meadows. Mozzie spent a moment imagining her in a tennis dress and nearly missed the introductions.

Her friends were Sami and Lee-Anne. Sami couldn't take her eyes off of Neal and Lee-Anne couldn't see anyone but Cindy, so Mozzie had plenty of time to try some more of the wine while Neal charmed the ladies. He and Neal were a bit outnumbered, but it wasn't anything Neal couldn't handle. June was watching Sami and Lee-Anne with that look she had that made Mozzie not want to play chess with her. This dinner must be all about vetting Cindy's latest conquest. Mozzie had been to a couple of those, and the poor boy or girl needed a stout heart to manage a second invitation.

* * *

"You're working on this project together?" Neal said.

Mozzie could tell Neal was bored by the conversation, but Sami didn't seem to know he was playing the well-bred guest. She launched into another explanation about data mining techniques and database compression. Mozzie could follow her if he'd wanted to. He dabbled. He knew his way around the data streams, knew how to hack when he had to. He just didn't have the passion for it that these women obviously had.

"But that's the thing, Sami," Lee-Anne said, and Mozzie had heard that tone coming out of his own mouth with Neal more than once. "You have to keep the scope of the project inside the realm of the what can actually be accomplished. If you make the scope too vast, it gets too big to code and all we'll ever have is half a finished product."

Mozzie had told Neal that exact thing when he'd wanted to do that con in Saint-Tropez that required six copies of the same Matisse, each one just slightly wrong but each in a different way.

"Lee, I know you think that, but we can't just limit ourselves to a single application with this. We have to make the design flexible enough to be adapted to new use cases. Or old ones, in the case of Iraq."

"But if we don't do some level of customizing, we're never going to be able to capture all the data we need. You know as well as I do that time is not on anyone's side here. If we can't get the eyewitness data in there soon, we never will. I just, I feel such a sense of urgency about this—you know, that."

"Yeah, honey, I do. But your grandmother was the one who said we had to make it work for the Iraqi situation too."

"Yeah," Lee said and Cindy leaned in close and took her hand, winding their fingers together.

June, Mozzie noticed, was watching Neal through all this, not Lee-Anne.

"I missed something," Neal said, smiling to let the ladies know the fault was all his. "I thought you were working of a database that would combine similar types of data from different sources, not that I actually even know what that means," Neal paused to let everyone smile at his charming ignorance of all things technical. Neal had them all eating out his hand, right along with the salad course. "What's that got to do with Iraq?"

"Not Iraq, Iraqi art and antiquities," Sami said.

The servers June had hired filed in to remove the salad plates and bring on the dessert course. Mozzie tasted his perfectly adequately sized serving of an excellent chocolate cake with fresh strawberries. He knew how to find the rest in the kitchen later, this artful display of restraint would do for now.

"Iraqi art?" Neal said, when Sami had finished sliding her strawberries onto Lee-Anne's plate as surreptitiously as possible. Cindy did the same and Lee-Anne was rich in berries and grinning at her good fortune, her earlier agitation gone like a summer storm. June still had her eyes on Neal.

"Looted Iraqi art to be exact," Sami said. The hope is, well my hope is, that the project can be made applicable to other uses beyond our original goal and allow for a comprehensive database of all the information on missing, recovered and suspect pieces from all over the world.

"And yes, you're right, Grandmother did say we needed to care about the Iraqi situation now, not wait for half a century and then bother. She'd just got the family china back," Lee-Anne said to Neal, like this should explain everything. "She'd had secret tea parties with her sister using it when she was a little girl, and she got to have it back for a whole year before she died. She was right you know, that kind of thing is really hard to get good provenance for, and you have to start tracking it as soon as it's stolen or it's lost forever."

"So your original project... " Neal said, and he was looking back at June now, even though he was still smiling like he was paying attention to Sami.

"Is to collate all the lists of art and property looted by the Nazis during the Holocaust. There's databases and lists kept by governments and museums and archives all over the world. There's also a lot of eyewitness testimony about what was taken that needs to be recorded in a searchable form. We're trying to automate the data collection by using web crawling techniques, since a lot of these lists are online now, and our goal is to have one big database that can bring all this information together and make it impossible for anyone to claim innocence when they trade in this stuff."

"Admirable," Neal said.

June tipped her glass to Neal, the light catching the ruby red wine and the fine crystal of the glass and making it shimmer.

Mozzie had asked about the crystal once, expecting to hear some wild story about a heist or a con and the good old days, but instead she'd told him about finding it in a pawn shop in Brooklyn in 1973. She'd said she'd always wanted to know how it had ended up there, whose hands had held it before hers, but she'd never know the story behind it.

"Well and practical too," Sami said. "If the bastards who buy and sell this stuff can't see they're trading in blood, then at least we can make them easier to catch."

Mozzie set his fork down, his appetite for strawberries and chocolate had faded away to nothing.

"I have some contacts you might want to talk to," Neal said. "Insurance, FBI, they'll be very, very interested in your project, and if you play your cards right, you might get enough funding from them to help you develop this as big as you can dream it to be. I'll put them in touch with you."

"Really?" Lee-Anne said, and she looked over to Cindy with a huge smile and then looked over to June. "That's why you set this up isn't it Grandmother June?"

"One reason, darling."

"Oh, thank you. Thank you both."

"It was my pleasure darlings," June said. "Now why don't we ladies retire to the living room, I think I have a very fine brandy we can indulge in. The gentlemen, I'm sure, have some business to take care of upstairs."

* * *

"So, not selling the painting then," Mozzie said when they were back up in Neal's rooms.

"No, not selling the painting."

"June's a hell of a lady, isn't she?"

"That she is, Moz, and we don't deserve her," Neal said.

"You know she told me once about a job she worked with Byron and Ford where everything went pear shaped and they had to figure out a way to get a bunch of hot rocks found by the cops without getting burnt themselves."

"Yeah?" Neal said. He reached up behind the box of risotto and the tin of sardines in the other top cupboard and pulled out a dusty bottle of brandy that Mozzie happened to know was very, very good. "Why don't you tell me that story?"


End file.
